


pack up your troubles

by sleepyMoritz (Catherss)



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Human Disaster Matt Murdock, Post-Canon, Reflection, post the defenders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 20:59:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15590607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catherss/pseuds/sleepyMoritz
Summary: FOGGY NELSON 23:12Matt’s lease runs out in a couple weeksFOGGY NELSON 23:13Would you help me clear out his apartment?





	pack up your troubles

**Author's Note:**

> This is all doingsuper and the Daredevil Discord's fault. Big up to pogopop as always for beta reading!

 

Karen arrived to Matt’s apartment five minutes late, bearing a clinking plastic bag. Foggy was outside, looking good in some ways, and shit in others. His hair was smart and his suit well fitting, but he had dark circles under his eyes and a tired look that was just made worse when he smiled wearily at her approach. He was surrounded by a bunch of cardboard boxes.

“Hey,” Foggy said. “I was starting to think you weren’t coming.”

“No, sorry— I just had to drop by a bodega to get us some courage,” she said, holding the bag up. His mouth twitched into a smile.

“Well, that we may need,” he replied. He jangled the keys with an expectant expression - _you ready?_ \- and she nodded, sucking in a deep breath.

He unlocked the door, and with a last tight expression, pushed the door open. She picked up one pile of boxes, light and empty, and followed him in with a knot in her chest. God, it _smelled_ like him, like _dust_. On the table in the hallway in a ceramic bowl was a set of keys, spare glasses, some change. His shoes in neat rows under the bench, a jacket and cap hung on the line of wall-mounted hooks. Swallowing the lump in her throat, she pushed on into the main living area.

“Is this the first time you’ve been here— since?” Karen asked, setting the boxes down on the ground and the shopping bag and her purse on the island counter.

Foggy didn’t turn around to answer, instead heading to the kitchen. “No,” he said thickly, after a moment. “I, um. I’ve cleaned it up a bit, spent some nights here. Just... thinking, remembering. I didn’t want this place to go cold and empty, you know?”

“I get it,” Karen assured him, secretly grateful he had - she wasn’t sure she’d be able to handle it if Matt had left dusty plates out on the drying rack or half-eaten, rotting leftovers in the fridge, like there had been at Frank’s old house. As it was, warm morning light was streaming unfettered through the tall windows, but it wasn’t enough for it to feel full or lived in. It only highlighted the dust in the air, the sharp nostalgia of a place the both of them had spent so many happy evenings in.

She realised then that they had a mammoth task to get done on just one Saturday - when she’d moved houses as a girl, it’d taken them weeks of cumulative effort to get everything into boxes and into the van on the day. They only had limited space in Karen’s car, too, a select handful of boxes that would be go into storage, fated to be hidden away in Foggy’s attic when he got bored of being a single young professional living in the heart of the big city. What remained would be thrown away or donated to charities already listed in Matt’s will, which both Foggy and Karen had stubbornly refused to make any moves on. They’d have to declare him dead first, anyway, and divvying up the remains of his savings meant admitting he truly was gone, and truly not coming back. Matt hadn’t left many instructions, anyway - a tithe to his church, to the National Federation of the Blind, and a final cut going to the Bronx Freedom Project. But he’d obviously written his will when Nelson & Murdock was still on its wobbly foal legs, and not updated it since because everything left was supposed to go to the firm. Out of that, the Karen and Foggy were to get a bonus, depending on, as Matt had written wryly, “The lights being kept on long enough to make it to Christmas or the new financial year.”

It’d made her cry, when Foggy first read it out to her just a month after Matt had been missing. They were both each the other’s lawyer, and that hadn’t changed despite their tumultuous relationship. Those two really couldn’t even cut contact properly, too much history and tangled hope that they really could make it work, even after all the heartache.

“I was thinking we’d start in the kitchen,” Foggy suggested, putting a couple of mugs out on the counter. “Work our way through the living room, the bathroom, then... the bedroom.”

“Good plan,” she said amiably. She put her plastic bag on the counter and dug out two bottles of cheap whiskey; she wasn’t sure if it was Matt’s favourite, but it was the one he always bought. What was it he’d said - that he was always more comfortable with the cheap stuff? She wondered if he had a real favourite, the one he got as a treat when he had folded bills burning through his pocket. But she knew he hadn’t thought about money like that. Foggy raised his eyebrows and gave her a concerned look. “It’s going to be a long day.”

Foggy just shrugged, apparently not in the mood to argue. “Fair enough.”

He made the both of them a coffee using Matt’s cafetière, and then they set to work, silently putting all of his pots and pans into a box, throwing out the collection of nuts, herbs, spices, and other dried food he kept in glass jars on the counter. Though some of his food was still good, it felt almost rude to keep it and use it themselves because it was _Matt’s_. _He_ was going to use it, and now that he couldn’t, it wasn’t fair to use it all up. Then the freezer was emptied, and what was left of the longer lasting foodstuffs Foggy had left in the fridge. In one cupboard was a selection of tin cans, labelled carefully in braille and ordered in neat rows. Karen was blinking back tears but put them into a box to be given to a food bank. Foggy wasn’t doing much better, sniffing thickly every so often, his eyes red-rimmed.

The kitchen was comparatively easy. There wasn’t anything particularly personal in it, nothing much they had to err over keeping rather than donating. The living room was going to be harder. On the bookshelf was a collection of braille books that Matt asked to be given to the blind society who had helped him when he was still learning to navigate his newfound disability. She wished, suddenly, that she knew what they were, what he’d deemed important enough to actually spend money on rather than just borrow from the library. Foggy caught her running her finger over the title of one.

“Want to know what it says?” Foggy asked.

Right. Foggy couldn’t read braille by touch, but he knew the alphabet by sight, something she’d found herself picking up little snatches of when she handled papers for Matt. It wasn’t so hard to just learn the alphabet - more difficult were the contractions and punctuation, numbers and special characters.

“Please,” she said, handing over the hefty book.

He peered at it for a moment. “Shit, I’m rusty. Uh, okay, one sec.” After minute, he just sighed with a tiny smile playing over his lips. “It’s the Bible. Book of John.”

She looked back to the shelf. One and a half rows were taken up by identically sized books, pristine and spiral-bound. “Are these all the Bible?” she asked, incredulous.

“It’s a long book,” Foggy said reasonably. He picked up one of the other, slightly smaller books. Good to know even braille books had annoying inconsistencies in height. “He never read it through, though.”

“I know,” Karen said. “He said he was always guilty over that.”

Foggy shot her a sad smile, then attempted to read the one in his hands. “Uh... I think this is one of our college textbooks,” he said after a long moment, then tried another, which turned out to be another law book. Another, which was essentially a dictionary of braille contractions. A real dictionary in four parts, a law book, a missalette (prompting a Google search as to what the hell a missalette was), and then, finally: “It’s... I think it’s a children’s book.”

The paper was slightly yellowed and greyed, the edges frayed. It looked old. “Which one?”

“ _Fantastic Mr. Fox_ ,” Foggy said, his laugh broken and bittersweet. “He said this was his favourite book as a kid.”

“Little Matt reading in the dark,” Karen mused wistfully. She could picture it. A little dark-haired kid, smart mouthed and respectful all at once, sneaking heavy tomes into bed with him after he was supposed to be asleep. “I bet he was precocious.”

Foggy hummed and ran his fingers over the first page of the book as though he could read it that way. “I’m keeping this,” he said firmly after a moment, as though he was expecting Karen to disagree. “I know he said to donate it, but... it was his favourite.”

“Of course,” she said. It was only right.

The red cabinet in the back had CDs in it, which she’d known from her many visits, but she hadn’t realised that tucked at the back was, for some reason (given the lack of a TV) a handful of DVDs and box sets. Nothing more recent than 2014, and nothing especially telling. A couple of Disney classics, some action films, a couple movies known for being more thinky, and some stand up specials. Foggy burst into delighted laughter when he pulled out _The Lion King_.

“Oh, God... did I ever tell you about the DNR List we had back in college?”

“It... rings a bell? I think you might have mentioned it drunk one time.”

“Sounds about right. We used to watch a lot of films, since we spent a lot of time being antisocial with each other. The DNR List was--“ He cut himself off with a faraway chuckle. “It was a bunch of films we watched together and cried at. We were both so bad for crying at films-- I’d be describing them to Matt, and it’d just be so _sad_ , and then _I’d_ start crying, then _he’d_ know I was crying and start as well,” Foggy explained, flipping the colourful case to look at the description on the back. “So we vowed to never watch them in front of anyone else because of how bad we got. The Do Not Rewatch list. _Lion King_ was on it.”

“Dead father,” she said softly, the story of the two of them watching sad films together making her smile.

“Yeah. Probably made worse by the fact that Simba actually finds his dad himself.” Foggy slipped the rest of the DVDs out of the cabinet, then sat with a glazed expression. “Matt hated pirating films. Whenever his scholarship money came in, he’d buy us a DVD, or we’d rent from Blockbuster, make an evening of it. This was before Netflix really kicked off.”

“He didn’t like pirating and he dressed in a Devil costume to beat on people,” Karen said, slightly dazed.

He turned to her and gave a wry smile. “Hey, the man was full of contradictions.”

Karen snorted and pulled out the CDs, each labelled in braille. A real eclectic selection - blues, jazz, pop, bands she’d never heard of, and a recording of traditional Irish songs with a faded cover. She couldn’t imagine him listening to that - it sounded like something her grandma would’ve put on. Maybe it’d been his father's. Larger was the collection of audiobooks, which contained multiple histories of New York, two copies of _Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone _and none of the subsequent books in the series, a handful of books about social inequality, and a few American classics. She’d seen all of these before, and she silently put them into the thus-far-not-especially-full box of stuff to keep of Matt’s.

Next was the under-stair closet. They instantly agreed to keep the battered trunk containing his Dad’s boxing memorabilia. Under that was a handful of spares to his Daredevil suit; a pair of gloves, two chipped red batons, hand wraps. She carefully lifted the billy clubs out and just held them for a moment.

“Weird, isn’t it?” Foggy said. “It’s one thing to _know_ that he was Daredevil, but to see it up close...”

They were weighty in her palm, and she noticed on one silver tip was old, scarlet blood ingrained into the pattern of the metal. Had Matt known that they were bloody? Had he cared? “Where did he even get these?”

“He said he got his Devil of Hell’s Kitchen kit online, but this one... I don’t know. Maybe he had a Q.”

“Like James Bond?” she asked with a laugh.

“Well, they were both orphans,” Foggy said, his smile slipping. “I’m just surprised he was never poached by the Avengers or X-Men or something.”

“I guess he was kind of small fry, compared to them.” She rolled the cool metal in her hands, then gently placed the batons back where they belonged. “He might not have saved the world, but he saved so many lives. As Daredevil, and as Matt Murdock.”

Foggy gently replaced the cover, then closed the lid. “It makes you think, doesn’t it?” he said quietly. “How one guy can be so important, but so...”

“Unimportant,” Karen finished flatly, staring at the odds and ends of Matt’s secret life. “Forgotten.”

“People haven’t forgotten Matt,” Foggy protested gently, comfortingly.

“They haven’t forgotten Daredevil,” she corrected. “We— I— everyone... we forgot about Matt, then he wandered into a building and got himself killed.”

Karen’s heart squeezed again and Foggy wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulling her into his chest. “This wasn’t our fault,” he muttered. “We were doing the best we could. You know how he was.”

“We knew how he was,” she whispered, her words muffled in Foggy’s t-shirt, now warm with her tears long-coming. “And we let it happen.”

Foggy shushed her and rocked her and whispered again and again that it was okay, that it wasn’t their fault. She scrambled to hold onto him, then pulled him in tight, desperately aware that she never really hugged anyone anymore, and she was never held when she cried in the otherworldly hours between the time reasonable people go to sleep and dawn. When Karen’s sobs had died down, her head pounding, Foggy said, “Matt knew he was going to die from doing this.” She pulled away from him, and he gently brushed a tear off her hot cheeks. “And honestly... I don’t think he’d have it any other way.”

She nodded, ducked her head, pushed her hair out of her face. “Do you think Matt was suicidal?” she asked lowly, picking anxiously at the skin at her cuticles. “Or just willing to die for a cause?”

Foggy sighed, shrugged. “I think a cause gave him an excuse not to care either way. But Matt had always been... I don’t know. Melancholy.”

 _Sad_ , her mind supplied. Matt had always been _sad_.

They took a break after clearing out the rest of the cupboard, before tackling the bathroom, then the bedroom, the one she was really dreading for reasons she couldn’t really pinpoint. Mostly, it seemed unspeakably personal to gut a person’s bedroom, the place Matt made up for _him_ , with far less regard as to what visitors would think. They finally broke into the whiskey, setting out three glasses; the final one Foggy filled then didn’t seem to know what to do with.

“I think you’re supposed to pour it on the ground,” Karen suggested.

Foggy just stared at it for a long moment. “When we’re done,” he said, taking a deep breath. “We’ll pour it out on the roof.” Foggy looked up at her, looking wrecked. He downed his whiskey, a grimace twisting his face before it settled back into angry grief.

“Let’s make a start on the bathroom,” she said, because nothing else came to mind apart from _I know, Foggy, I know._

The bathroom involved as much throwing stuff out as the kitchen had. Foggy silently handed her the bottle of expensive shampoo out of the shower, uncapped. She smelled it, and grinned as she recognised the delicate, floral scent. For some reason, it’d always delighted her that such a macho man would use what was supposed to be a woman’s shampoo. But, then again, Matt had such a sixth sense for artificial scents that normal men’s products would smell gross to him. That had made a _lot_ of sense when he told her about his powers.

Next to the sink was one of those sets of drawers made of cloth with a metal frame. Opening the bottom one, she frowned; an assortment bobby pins and hair ties among some other random junk of his Matt’d chucked in there. She froze for a moment - did Matt have a girlfriend she didn’t know about, even after they were communicating so well? - but there was nothing else to indicate a woman’s continued presence in the bachelor pad of an apartment. With a slight, uncomfortable jolt, she realised this was a product of serial monogamist Matt.

“Liked to make them feel at home, huh?” she said. Foggy peered over her shoulder and snorted.

“Oh my God, that’s awful,” he groaned despairingly. “I can’t decide if I want to high-five him or tell him not to be such a slut.”

Then Foggy seemed to realise at the exact same moment she did that it might be all _wrong_ to talk shit about the dead, to say stuff like that in front of someone who came so close to being one of Matt’s girls, if she’d played it all differently. She liked to think they’d had more than that, but if she’d made a move on that very first evening when they’d met, _would_ Matt have said no? Karen thought about it, sometimes, the two of them lying awake in separate rooms. When they’d been inching closer to romance, dipping their toes in, she’d fantasise about what would’ve happened-- _if._ If she’d come and sat on the couch next and touched him rather than going back to her apartment. If he’d come and hovered in the doorway, asking for her permission with the tilt of his head and a coy smile. If, if, if.

“Definitely the latter,” Karen said after a moment. She hadn’t decided if she thought it was weird Matt kept all that shit or not - he apparently hadn’t seen anything wrong with it, which, granted, wasn’t exactly an amazing way to gauge if something was normal or not. “Wasn’t he supposed to be Catholic?”

Foggy looked relieved she wasn’t pissed. “Only on Sundays.”

Karen laughed. Into the trash everything went.

They decided to break for some food before moving onto the rest. After carrying a few of boxes containing things to be donated down to Karen’s car, they stopped off at the appropriate places to drop them off. Matt had wanted his fancy kitchenware to go to the orphanage where he grew up, despite the fact that he was vocal about absolutely _hating_ it there.

“They never taught me to cook,” Matt had complained as he made the two of them a pasta dish with some unpronounceable French name (it had, of course, turned out to be delicious). “Well, they taught me how to boil vegetables. You know that stereotype about white people and flavour? That was literally me until undergrad.”

The nun at the reception desk of St. Agnes peered at them suspiciously when they arrived, carrying a couple of boxes. Though the interior was nice enough, if outdated, the exterior was tall and intimidating. It looked more like the sort of place that used to be a factory, and would be knocked down and replaced by apartments the moment the orphanage closed its doors. Something cold settled into her stomach at the thought of Matt growing up here, but then again, impersonal buildings weren’t exactly uncommon homes for kids in New York.

“Um-- these are--” Foggy started, then took a deep breath. “My friend, he’s… officially, he’s missing, but he’s been missing for six months so he’s probably, y’know. Um. He grew up here and he wanted the orphanage to have them.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, my-- may he rest in peace,” she said, doing the sign of the cross over her breastbone. “What was his name?”

“Matt Murdock.”

A small grin played across her face. “Matthew-- the blind one?”

“Yeah!” Karen said, surprised.

“Oh, I remember him!”

“You do?” Foggy asked, delighted. “What was he like?”

The nun thought for a second. “Smart,” she said. “Very smart. He had such a tough time after his father died and mentor left.”

“Mentor?” Karen asked, confused.

“Stick,” Foggy muttered to her. Right.

The nun looked between the two of them. “Yes, well, he pulled through. The younger children loved him. He was always very kind to them, especially the quiet ones. What happened to him? He didn’t get caught up in something, did he?”

And that was the awkward thing. It was, in reality, only Foggy, Karen, and a handful of others who knew for sure that Matt was dead. To everyone else, he was just missing, and not long enough to be declared dead _in absentia_. There had been a police investigation, but it had, of course, come up short. No leads, no motive, no nothing. It was as if Matt had simply dropped off the face of the world; that he’d been “kidnapped” by the Defenders, then never seen again. Because of that, the police were inclined to agree that he was dead, somewhere in the rubble of Midtown Circle. It was frustrating, actually, how quickly law enforcement had just thrown up their hands and shrugged when nothing had come up. The off chance that he _was_ alive…? She just had to live with it, because that niggling feeling was probably never going to go away.

“He… ah,” Foggy hummed. “He did, a bit. But he’s just… gone.”

“Perhaps he’ll show up,” the nun said. “Maybe you shouldn’t donate his things just yet?”

“No,” Foggy said sharply. The nun gave him an odd look, and he attempted to recover. “Besides, he can always buy this stuff again if he does show up. We’re keeping his personal cr-- things.”

“Good boy,” the nun said approvingly.

After that, they went out to go get lunch at a place very close to where Nelson & Murdock had been. The owner recognised them, gave them food for free despite the fact it’d been almost a year since they’d been here last. They decided to get Matt’s usual order, too, and split it between the both of them.

Back at the apartment, Karen felt much better about tackling the bedroom, but it was strange to walk back in to see all the half-filled or sealed cardboard boxes. It was what friends did, wasn’t it? Pack up a life into boxes because it was better to let it collect dust in storage than throw out all the weird, personal junk people collected over a lifetime.

Crossing the threshold into Matt’s bedroom, she gave Foggy a glance - _so… where do we start?_

“Wardrobe,” he said, bringing the bottle of whiskey with him.

Karen nodded, and began the deeply uncomfortable process of taking the clothes off the labelled hangers, folding them up, and putting them into a box. His clothes were very utilitarian - even in his more casual wear there wasn’t any of the shit she’d amassed like the odd band shirt, or the more out-there outfits she promised herself that one day she’d be brave enough to wear. At the bottom of the closet were some more pairs of shoes, and some card storage boxes, neatly lined up.

She flipped one open. It was full to the brim of medical documentation. The nosy part of her wanted to read it, but she quickly pushed that down. “Should we keep this?”

“Yeah,” Foggy said. “I know-- I know he really is gone, but if he _isn’t_ , then…”

“He’ll need it,” she finished. “It’s okay. You’re allowed to keep things.”

Foggy nodded and sniffed, his hair falling in front of his face. “I just feel that Matt would think it was so stupid of us to keep useless stuff around just because it was his. Fuck-- he’d probably just think he was taking up space, even in the afterlife.”

“He’s probably looking down on us and laughing,” she said.

“You’re not Christian,” Foggy said, surprised.

“I’m not,” she admitted. “But he was. And I’m starting to see the appeal.”

Karen flipped open another box. More medical papers, it seemed. The final box was a bunch of loose-leaf braille documents, stapled or held together with a paperclip. Foggy tilted the box up to examine the label.

“It’s just called ‘misc’,” Foggy groaned. “Okay, very helpful, Matt.”

Karen flipped through the papers. Some of them had “Matt” written on them in pencil or biro, but it was far too neat to be his handwriting. “Maybe it's… worksheets, of some kind?”

Midway through, they came across a handful of pages written in pencil on faded lined paper. It was simply _Matthew M. Murdock_ written over and over again in shaky script, a developing signature. It started out neat, careful and blocky, but eventually morphed into the curvy, showy way she’d seen him write it on documents, albeit far more rushed and sloppy. “He practised signing his name,” Karen said, trying and failing to bite down on her grin. “Oh my God. That’s so cute.”

“I wonder how old this is,” Foggy said, feeling the paper between his thumb and index finger. “And why he kept it.”

“Probably just got thrown in with all his other shit,” she reasoned. “I kept all of my old schoolwork. That’s probably just what this is.”

“There’s only one box of it, though,” he said, confused.

“I guess he was more stingy than I was.” Karen continued flipping through, and came across a yellow hardback workbook with a braille sticker label on it. “See?”

Foggy took it off her and opened it. He burst into delighted laughter. “They gave him braille stickers for good work!” She peered over his shoulder to look at the workbook, which had a cheerfully yellow sticker with _bravo!_ written on it with a cartoon medallion below what was presumably the braille translation. The pages of the book stuck together when Foggy flipped through them and made a pleasantly brittle crinkling sound. “I always thought he did his schoolwork on a laptop.”

Karen thought on it for a moment. “Maybe this was him learning to write braille?”

“No one writes in braille,” Foggy pointed out.

“Maybe they still teach kids how to do it,” she suggested. “It doesn’t look like printed braille. Don’t you have to, like, stick’n’poke backwards if you want to write it yourself? What does it say?”

Foggy let out a breath between pursed lips and tried to read it. After a minute or so, he eventually said, “It says, “The letter _x_ can be used to mean _it_. For example, x is a dog.””

Karen hummed and shuffled to lean backwards on Matt’s bed, feeling the need to take a moment, nursing the bottle of whiskey. “Do you find it weird to think of him as ever being sighted?”

“Yeah,” Foggy admitted, flipping to the final page and back cover where there was some sort of a stencil tucked into the vinyl pocket. “He was so quick reading braille and getting around… It is kind of strange to think that at one point, he was probably really bad at it.”

“With what he could do, though - surely that would’ve helped.”

Foggy shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I think it made it worse. He once said to me that Stick saved his life because after his dad died his powers went so haywire he could barely leave his room.”

In the box, they also found his Columbia acceptance letter and his school transcripts. Giving them a cursory glance, they all seemed fine - exemplary, really - until a massive dip midway through his second year of law school. “What happened there?” Karen asked.

“That was when he met Elektra,” Foggy said.

“The one who died,” Karen said softly.

“Yup. And was resurrected,” Foggy said, tilting his head up with a wry smile. Karen knew the look - _what even is our life right now?_

“Why did they break up?” Karen asked. “He never explained that to me.”

“Me neither,” Foggy admitted. “They were… I mean, they were crazy in love. Matt was getting into all sorts of trouble with her, and then it seemed like she just up and left. He was so cut up over all of that he could barely get out of bed. It was so tough to watch.”

Much to both of their delight, they also found high school report cards in the box. Two versions, normal print (signed by a Sister Mary where the parent’s signature usually went) and braille were stapled together, so they could read them easily. She thought for a moment about her own report cards at her parents’ house, and realised the only reason Matt had these at his place was because there was no where else for them to go.

“ _Matthew is a very bright young man_ ,” wrote his 11th Grade English teacher, “ _though he needs to stop reading in class and pay more attention to the lesson at hand_.”

“ _Matthew is a hard working student who has a talent for public speaking. Perhaps he should consider pursuing motivational speaking as a career_.” They burst out laughing at that one - neither of them could imagine Matt getting up on some TEDx stage and telling his life story. It was hard enough for him to do it to his friends.

A sweet note had been written by his homeroom teacher. “ _Matt, it has been a pleasure to know you. You are an exemplary student with a bright future ahead of you. I have enjoyed our chats immensely, and our ‘book club’. My last recommendation for you going into college is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I hope you enjoy college, and remember what we talked about. Many happy wishes, Mrs McCullough._ ”

“God, he was such a teacher’s pet, wasn’t he?” Karen laughed.

“He was in college, too. Always went to office hours, rewrote essays multiple times to get them right. He loved all of that kind of thing,” Foggy told her. “But if they were dicks, he’d turn and hold a grudge for _forever_. If he’d decided they were an asshole, there was no winning him over. But if he decided he liked them… you couldn’t shut him up. He had this weird old professor for Contract Law that he _loved_ \- I never got it, but Matt was legitimately sad when he finished that class because he wasn’t going to have any other classes with the guy.”

Karen noticed in his 10th Grade report card, there was simply a line through the teacher’s comment box for gym class. She checked back with the others that Matt’d kept and it was the same for all of them. “Did they not let him do sports?” she asked, horrified.

“It’s… pretty common,” Foggy said, uncomfortable. “Schools don’t want to be the reason blind kids run into poles and knock their teeth out.”

“Oh,” she said. “But… there’s blind people who are in the Paralympics, aren’t there? That must have driven him insane.”

“Probably,” Foggy said as he tucked the reports away again, and continued flipping through the box. “I’m surprised he didn’t just up and do it anyway.”

At the very bottom was one of those wallets that came with film developed at a photo store. It was full, but old and faded. Foggy looked hesitant for a moment, but then shrugged and took a look inside. “Anything interesting?” Karen asked.

“Well, you were saying you couldn’t imagine him sighted?”

Foggy handed her a glossy picture of a dark-haired, round faced little boy sitting at a tiny kitchen table next to a colourful backpack, glaring at the camera. “No way,” she gasped. “This _cannot_ be him!?”

“Puberty did a hell of a number,” Foggy replied with a grin. “How old do you reckon he is there?”

“Seven, maybe?” She drank in all the details, finding herself inexplicably drawn to the photograph. “Wow.”

Foggy shuffled back so they were both leaning against the bed as they took a look at each picture, passing the whiskey back and forth. They were all clearly from different times of his life; the earliest was a broad-shouldered man cradling a swaddled infant, but there weren’t any of his mother. Perhaps it was always his mother taking the pictures, until Jack disappeared altogether and Matt was alone in the frame. After that, there was a missing period, all the teenage years when he was in the orphanage just… gone. Then he returned in a Polaroid as a dazed, baby-faced adult with a clean shave, a beer in one hand, and his cane in the other.

After that, there were only two other pictures. One was of Matt, lying on a cramped dorm bed with a book propped up against his jean clad legs, his hands crossed loosely over his shirtless chest. He didn’t look chubby, per se, but certainly far less cut than she’d realised he was three weeks into working at Nelson & Murdock when he’d rocked up soaked to the bone because of unexpected rain, his hair plastered to his forehead and his white shirt clinging to abs that’d legitimately forced her to take a moment. All of the extra vigilante work must’ve taken care of any excess fat. In the picture, he was peering lazily out of one unfocused eye above the lens, with a cheeky smile, like he knew he was hot shit. He looked achingly young, but in a way that was so _recognisable_ to Karen that it caught her off guard - a look she’d caught every so often, when Matt was really drunk and trying to express something he didn’t have words for. There seemed to be a _lot_ Matt didn’t have words for.

It struck her again that Matt truly did have a private life outside of all the angst of the devil suit, the sort of private life they all had. The people he knew in high school like Mrs McCullough, in college, in life, and the tiny victories or the funny small things that happened on a day-to-day basis that weren’t worth reporting to his friends but still made him smile. Heartbreak he never got over and people he still loved, even after everything they did to him; all the little quirks of a man that only would’ve been apparent if she’d lived with him, as Foggy had. Though the sliver of time she’d known Matt for had felt like it stretched on for eternity in the very best way, he had been known by others long before Nelson & Murdock.

Then the last one was of Matt and Foggy, leaning on opposite kitchenette counters in what must’ve been student dorms. Matt had his head thrown back in laughter, and Foggy was making an exasperated gesture at him, but grinning all the same. There was another guy, just in frame, visibly rolling his eyes. She’d seen college photos before, but not many of the two of them together - usually, it was Foggy taking grainy pictures of Matt doing something stupid with his camera phone, or photographic evidence of the mess left after a night of drinking. However, they were both tagged in a few on Facebook and Karen would be lying if she said she hadn’t found herself checking through Matt’s tagged photos every so often, as if a new one would show up.

“One of the girls he kinda-sorta dated always used to carry a camera around,” Foggy said, thinking back hard. “Ah, shit, her name was Becca, Becky, Bea, something like that. I’m guessing the first photo he wasn’t supposed to keep. The second… maybe it was supposed to go to me?”

“Why would he keep any of these?” she mused. “They would’ve been pointless to him.”

“Well, we’re keeping all of his things, aren’t we?” Foggy said, gesturing to the piles of stuff they’d decided should be kept. “And it's useless to us. It's just what you do. You keep it.”

She didn’t have any kind of a smartass response to that. It wasn’t like Matt had kept much, in all.

They cleared out the rest of the wardrobe, sticking an old laptop they found in with the miscellaneous documents, the few spare canes in a pile to be donated, though Foggy decided to keep one - again, just in case. Then there was the chest of drawers, which contained mostly just worn old casual clothes, socks, underwear and a huge amount of files in the bottom two, as a result of the pro bono work he was doing towards the end of his life. After that, they moved onto the bedside drawers, which contained no less than three rosaries. The first was made of a rich, muted wood, far more concerned about getting the job done than looking showy whilst doing it. The second looked more expensive, with elegant pearl-like beads and extravagant white detail. The last was sleek, black with a silver crucifix, Christ standing out beautifully on dark wood.

“I wonder why he had three,” she mused.

“One was probably his communion rosary,” Foggy explained. “At a guess, the white one. I remember that he used this one in college,” he said, delicately lifting up the wooden rosary. “But the black one… I don’t know. A gift? Maybe he fancied changing it up.”

Karen picked up the dark one and let it curl comfortably in her palm. She’d never held a rosary before that she could remember, but something about the idea of the ritual was appealing. It was easy to see why a guy like Matt with such a maze of an internal morality would take so much comfort in it. “It suits him.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Foggy looked up at her, the white rosary tangled in his fingers. “Want to keep it?”

“Are you sure?”

“Karen, you…” Foggy chuckled. “I know you didn’t know him in college, but he kinda didn’t have a lot of close friends. But I know that you were one of them. He’d want you to keep something of his.”

She nodded mutely and wrapped it around her wrist a few times so it rested above her watch, the crucifix out of the way of her hands, thinking that none of them really knew what Matt would’ve wanted. But she was as selfish as anyone else - she wanted something of his to keep, as if a tiny momento could be enough to represent the complicated years she knew him. “The wooden one— if Matt had a grave or a funeral, I’d say we should bury it with him.”

“Well, give it seven years,” Foggy huffed. “Then we can hold a real funeral with a casket and weeping women in black and flowers. Not just us drinking at Josie’s with everyone else the cat dragged in.”

The idea of waiting seven years felt unfathomable. God, the two of them would be in their mid thirties by then, and Matt would still be preserved, a late twenties young professional, still trying to figure out how to be young and mature at the same time. “Is there somewhere we could put it?”

Foggy ran his thumb over one of the beads. The movement was strangely fixating; absentmindedly, she copied the notion on the rosary on her wrist, now warm because of her skin. “In the Hudson?” he suggested.

Karen nodded quickly. It felt _right_. “Yeah. In the Hudson.”

The bedside drawers also contained a braille book review publication, and then a folio with what took them far too long to figure out was Sudoku puzzles. Moisturiser, cell phone charger, Vaseline, spare glasses, a medallion of St. Jude that clearly had some Catholic significance but meant nothing to her, some heavy duty headphones that when she tried on utterly blocked out the world. A smaller and less intense first aid kit with than the one above his living room bookshelf with bloody fingerprints all over it, containing bandages, gauze, Tylenol and ibuprofen. She was surprised that there weren’t any condoms. Maybe he really was too Catholic for frivolous premarital sex, and the two of them had just been making assumptions. Maybe he’d just not stocked up again after becoming Daredevil - it was apparent that he had barely had time for his friends, never mind relationships. Matt had made an attempt to explain the time that Karen stumbled across a woman in his bed, but he’d done it with a set jaw and a pained look that made him look like he was expecting her to tell him off for trying to save someone’s life. Later reflection made her wonder if there had been something more going on there, but at that point their relationship had been far too strained for her to have the energy to dig, to question. She wished she had. It was clear that some switch had been flicked in Matt’s head during that episode, and hadn’t turned back until the short lived Daredevil hiatus.

Once they’d taken the remaining curios from the drawers, they realised that they were close to being finished. They checked under the bed, but only found case with weights in, a dusty tie that had clearly fallen down the back of the bed then left there, forgotten, and some remaining odds and ends. After they moved everything into the living room, the only thing left to do was strip the bed.

When Karen said that, Foggy just looked stricken. “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s go up to the roof?”

Karen nodded, grabbed the bottles of whiskey and a share size bag of chips from the shopping bag, and followed Foggy up the rickety stairs to the roof. She’d only been up here once in daytime, but at some point, the sun had sunk to leave a breathtaking, glittering city. They decided to carry up Matt’s armchairs and put them facing outwards towards New York. She slouched in the comfortable seat, a whiskey in one hand, and her face warming with the effects of alcohol. The billboard opposite Matt’s apartment was bright, and Foggy’s face was lit by a shifting kaleidoscope of blues, pinks, purples. He looked worn out.

“Thank you for today,” Foggy said, his eyes meeting hers for a brief moment. “It means a lot.”

“No, of course. I wanted to,” she said, before she could stop herself. “Without a body, I think this might be the closest thing I’ll get to closure.”

“Until seven years, and then we can declare him dead _in absentia_ and have a funeral,” Foggy said with a twitch of a smile.

“Well, yeah, but I was hoping for something more in the near-future.” She cradled her drink, the air pleasantly cool. “Anyways, funerals aren’t the same thing as closure,” she muttered, thinking of the funeral of her brother. God, had that really been almost a decade ago now?

“True,” he said with a tilt of his head. “I wonder if it stops hurting, eventually.”

“I don’t think it does,” Karen said. “But it gets easier.”

Foggy accepted that, taking another sip. His eyes faced out of the city, but she got the impression that he wasn’t really looking. “I don’t think I could ever get over Matt.” His mouth twisted into a complicated smile. “What a guy, huh?”

Foggy took the third glass - Matt’s glass - and stood up, walking over to the high wall. Karen followed him, her steps a little bit shaky, and ended up leaning heavily against the smooth concrete. He toasted into the air, and yelled out to the unhearing city, “Matt Murdock! What a guy!”

She copied him, her voice echoing off the streets, quiet in the night. “What a guy!”

She wanted the whole fucking city to know; every one of its millions of inhabitants that Matt Murdock - not just Daredevil - was an incredible human. God, despite his flaws, despite all the frustration and the utter bullshit he pulled on them, she couldn’t deny that in spite of it all, she had loved him. She _had_. Her heart ached in her heavy chest and she had _loved_ him. It was a goddamn crime that it seemed like such a lonely few who even remembered Matt beyond the things he did for them or the inspiration his death gave them. Matt had given and given and given and hadn’t known how to take back in a way that worked, that functioned. She knew that wasn’t his fault, but it had hurt regardless. It _still_ fucking hurt, like a pickaxe through her chest.

Foggy gave a glance over the edge of the roof, then let the whiskey fall onto the street, so far down it couldn’t be heard above the ambient din of Hell’s Kitchen. “We miss you, Matt,” Foggy said, an atheist’s prayer, his head tilted up to the black abyss of a sky. If only it could be starry, she thought, like back in Vermont. A beautiful starry sky for the final night. “Ah, God. I miss you so bad. I’m sorry about all of it, buddy. And I hope that wherever you are, you can get some damn peace and quiet. You’ve earned it.”

They stumbled back to their chairs and poured themselves another drink and just talked and talked, getting progressively drunker and drunker. They recalled all the good stories; Matt’s incredible victories in court, his quirks, his sense of humour, the nights out at bars and nights in watching movies until they fell asleep in a pile on the couch of whoever’s apartment they’d ended up in. But it was impossible to remember the good without the bad, so they joked about all the little things that had pissed them off no end at the time but were now laughably inconsequential. They didn’t talk about the big flaws. Now wasn’t the time, and really, there was nothing to be said except that it sucked. It really, really, _really_ sucked.

After a long period of silence, intercut only with sirens from the streets, Foggy muttered, “I’m falling asleep.”

“Me too,” Karen slurred, head rolling onto the back of the chair. “Maybe I should go.”

“No,” Foggy said sharply, turning towards her so she could see his sincere expression. “God, no. Sleep here. I will be.” His voice became distant. “One last time.”

So they stumbled back down the stairs and Karen paused on the landing. Foggy grabbed her arm and pulled her, gently, to Matt’s bedroom. Dazed, she let herself be lead, and Foggy pulled her down onto his bed, still made up perfectly. For a moment, she didn’t want to wreck it, but then she thought, _who fucking cares?_ and slipped under the smooth sheets the heavy duvet. The smell of Matt utterly enveloped her, startlingly strong for how long it’d been since he’d slept here. Foggy joined her and she rested her head on his shoulder, his warm presence comforting beyond words.

“This is so much better than going home,” she mumbled. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” he whispered back into her hair, then kissed her on the forehead. “You know I’m here, Karen. Whenever you need me.”

“You too- _ooh_ ,” she said, cut off by a yawn. Foggy chuckled softly but didn’t say anything more. With the smell of Matt wrapped around her, and Foggy’s warmth bleeding up, she fell into an easy sleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The next morning found her awake as dawn filtered in through the windows, because of course Matt didn’t have blinds. With a groan, she checked her phone and realised that she still had the rosary on her wrist, deep pink pock marks where the beads had pressed into her skin as she slept. 07:04. Jesus. In the night, Foggy had apparently ended up spooning her, his arm slung loosely over her waist. It was warm and comfortable, but her raging headache and scratchy throat was more urgent, so she slipped out of bed, almost toppling over. She was still a bit drunk, apparently. Great.

Karen wandered into the kitchen and drank from the tap, then filled up a couple glasses. She found some painkillers in her purse, then took everything back into the bedroom. She sat on the bed, just looking at Foggy. His hair was mussed and his clothes rumpled, but his face was peaceful in sleep. She could only hope that it was something that could stick, even awake.

When she slipped back under the covers, Foggy let out a pained little groan. “Wha—?”

“It’s 7AM,” Karen whispered. “Have some water and go back to sleep.”

Foggy looked around blearily for the water and chugged it down, along with a couple of Tylenol she’d left out on the side. “T’nks,” he mumbled, before collapsing back on the bed, tucking his nose into the pillow and breathing in deeply.

She dozed for a while, and was eventually roused again by Foggy pushing himself slowly upwards like a capsized ship righting itself. Feeling rough, she followed suit, and managed to scrounge a couple of fruit bars from her purse to snack on while they drank some coffee. Afterwards, they tidied up in silence, replacing the furniture they were leaving for the landlord, stripping the sheets, and putting all of the boxes in Karen’s car. It didn’t all fit and Karen wasn’t sober enough to drive, so they called a taxi and packed everything going to Foggy’s place in it. After they dropped it all off and freshened up a bit, they got some pastries and more coffee from a bakery for breakfast, then took the long walk up to the George Washington Bridge, talking more easily than they ever had since Matt had died. Whenever they’d tried to meet before, they’d always end up sitting in meditative silence in bars, as if waiting for Matt to come sit down with another round and interject with some smart-ass comment.

The wind was bracingly chill when they walked out over the murky, muddy river. A ship’s horn blared somewhere in the distance, and below, a tiny red boat trucked along, causing a white-foamed rift in the water that quickly lapped over and healed. Once they reached the centre point, Foggy pulled the wooden rosary out of his jacket pocket and wrapped it loosely around his fist so the crucifix dangled down over the edge of the bridge.

“I feel like I should say some words,” Foggy said after a moment, his voice almost drowned out by the wind and the noise of the cars. “Isn’t that what people do?”

“Screw what people do,” she replied.

Foggy licked his lips and nodded with an amused upwards quirk of the corner of his mouth. After a few beats while they both just looked at the worn, smooth wood, without another word, he let the chain of beads fall down into the Hudson.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading - all comments and concrit are very welcome <3
> 
> The title of this fic comes from the WW1 song, but there's multiple versions of that song out there. 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at sleepymoritz.


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